Twentieth century commercial whaling drastically reduced the abundance of great whale populations in the Southern Ocean. Exploitation began on the south Atlantic island of South Georgia, where catch records account for over 175,000 whales killed. Modern whaling within the Southern Ocean depleted populations rapidly, and by 1966, hunting blue whales...
Most existing methods for generating individual task time estimates in production systems where jobs move through various manually operated workstations remain tedious and time consuming. For existing systems, average task times may vary considerably from prior estimates causing system inefficiencies, poor scheduling and poor planning decisions. Accurate and up-to-date estimates...
Reactor modeling is largely limited by the computational time required to perform accurate full core calculations. There are many different methods and techniques employed in different reactor simulation codes, but properly modeling all of the physics that takes place in the system requires extensive computational effort. The Coarse Mesh Finite...
Uveitis is a serious ophthalmological disorder characterized by intraocular infiltration of inflammatory cells. In most cases, uveitis is derived from the adaptive immune response. More specifically, CD4+ T lymphocytes play an important role in the pathogenesis of uveitis by recognizing uveitogenic antigen and orchestrating the immune response. While it is...
The prevalence of exercise-induced menstrual dysfunction (ExMD) ranges between 6-79% in endurance-trained women and may result from a low energy availability (EA; kcal/kgFFM/d). EA is the energy remaining after planned exercise, which is available for basic physiological processes and daily living activities. One mechanism for energy conservation may be a...
As the number of mobile devices accessing large-scale WLANs such as campus
and metropolitan area networks increases, the need for load balancing among the
cells becomes crucial. In addition, the network must also support some minimum
handoff tolerance defined by an application.
A number of load balancing techniques have been...
In 2009, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife initiated a process to incorporate information about climate change and its effects on fish, wildlife, and habitats into the Oregon Conservation Strategy. The agency acknowledged that climate change is already affecting Oregon’s species and habitats and that future climate change represents...
The Internet is growing rapidly in terms of websites, users and uses. People use the Internet for reference, shopping, social networking, communications, business and much more. Though the Internet is useful, there are many risks associated with its use, like malicious websites, identity theft, hateful content and fraudulent practices. Online...
Little research has been done in the area of adult Hispanics' transition to college, a complex and challenging process which marks a critical period in their lives. Research suggests adaptation difficulty may cause them to drop out of school usually before completion of the first terms. There is a lack...
Euphorbia lagascae (Euphorbiaceae- ‘spurge family’) has been recognized as one of the more promising potential new industrial crops for the drier regions in the temperate zone
(Roseberg, 1996). In the late 1950s and early 1960s the USDA analyzed many plant species in search of novel chemical compounds. They first recognized...
We show that Pappus Curves, introduced by R. Schwartz to study his dynamical system in the real projective plane generated by iterated applications of the classical Pappus Theorem, are algebraic exactly in the linear case. Our approach is to use properties of projective curves such as singular points, genus, number...
Within the past several years the technology of high-throughput sequencing has transformed the study of biology by offering unprecedented access to life's fundamental building block, DNA. With this transformation's potential a host of brand-new challenges have emerged, many of which lend themselves to being solved through computational methods. From de...
Around the globe, an array of alternative agrifood movements has emerged largely in response to the ecological and socio-economic threat caused by industrialized agricultural processes. From organic agriculture, to Slow Food, Locavore, and the Food Sovereignty movement, people around the world are reasserting their right to healthy and culturally appropriate...
In this thesis, convergence of time inhomogeneous Markov chains is studied using an adiabatic approach. The adiabatic framework considers slowly changing systems and the adiabatic time quantifies the time required for the change such that the final state of the system is close to some equilibrium state. This approach is...
We consider an SI model of three competing species that are all affected by a single pathogen which is transmitted directly via mass action. The total population sizes of the three species satisfy a three-dimensional Lotka-Volterra competition model. We address the interaction between competition and disease dynamics, and show that...
The present study examined whether emotion perception requires central attentional resources. A dual-task paradigm was used to examine whether people can direct their attention to a face expressing a target emotion, even while they are still selecting a response to another task. Task-1 required an auditory discrimination while for Task-2,...
Gap acceptance behavior is critical to the safety and operational performance of unsignalized intersections. The complex nature of the human behavior and its dependence on various socioeconomic and environmental parameters makes it challenging for transportation professionals to assess the performance of such intersections. To investigate the behavioral patterns of drivers...
Conservation of natural resources has become a new watchword of the scientific community. While many terrestrial ecosystems are well protected, marine ecosystems have only recently come to the forefront. Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) have been introduced as a means of protecting biodiversity, commercial stocks, and ecosystem services. There are many...
Purposeful introductions of exotic species for rehabilitation efforts following wildfire are common on rangelands in the western U.S., though potential ecological impacts of introduced species in novel environments are often poorly understood. One such introduced species, Kochia prostrata (L.) Schrad (forage kochia) has been seeded on over 200,000 ha throughout...
Fast fashion is a term used to describe trendy apparel created with a short cycle time and planned obsolescence. Consumers view such items as disposable due to poor garment quality and low price points. Although consumers are aware of the environmental impact of apparel consumption, the popularity of fast fashion...